[Leica] M magazine

[feli at creocollective.com (Feli di Giorgio)]

I'm not against artsy fartsy. Heck, both my parents are artist.
I just have something against navel gazing artists. 

Most artists have big egos and it's a necessity. You can't be an artist
without an opinion.

May Ray and the rest may have been out there, but it's hard 
to argue that weren't a very talented bunch. 

If one reads some of the papers written by the various Bauhaus artists
one will discover that there is an awful lot of thinking that went in to
those "squiggles" and seemingly senseless pieces and that's what
I don't see in a lot of modern work, which is often like bad acting.
Bad actors imitate. Good actors don't. Don't act, be.

Feli




On Thu, 2004-08-19 at 13:51, Scott McLoughlin wrote:
> It's a good point made that Capa was hip. HCB hung around
> with the most pretentious, self-consciously navel-gazing art
> crowd you can imagine, Andre Breton and the surrealists,
> and did his first commercial work, IIRC, for one of Breton's
> surrealist/communist (go figure on that mix!) publications
> in the 30's.
> 
> But anyway, whatever their work product or public persona, it
> shouldn't surprise folks that artists are typically, well, artists! You
> know, the self-consciously artsy, elite hipster types :-)  The
> public product and private person don't have to match up.
> 
> Weird examples (not photogs): quintisentially "American idol"
> Cary Grant was a bisexual Brit who liked halucinagenic drugs;
> real "down home" country musician Bonnie Raitt grew up in
> New York and went to Harvard (my alma matter).  Here's
> another really weird one. "Dukes of Hazard" Boss Hog went
> to Harvard too. Yup!  In real life, he was a "Dunster House Tea
> at 5:00" type of guy.
> 
> You get the idea. Have fun, add your own examples. It's not
> very hard!
> 
> So back to M and photogs, even if they do-or-have-done photo
> journalism work that we all adore, it doesn't mean that they
> themselves necessarily view that work as their best. Maybe, but
> maybe not.  Maybe that just pays the bills. Maybe they like to
> travel. Of course, maybe some do view their journalism work
> as their highest calling. 
> 
> But we shouldn't necessarily assume so. Just as likely, I'd wager
> that some, maybe many (no, not all!!!) really, really elite photogs
> are a bunch of somewhat "artsy fartsy" types who might have
> gone to nice schools, have a yearning desire to "do something
> new with the medium" and so on and so forth. What do you
> want? They're artists.
> 
> But I haven't seen "M", so I'm not claiming it doesn't totally
> suck :-)
> 
> Scott